Open Libraries | Libraries 2020

In partnership with the Internet Archive, DLF will mobilize its working groups and broader practitioner community to produce a dashboard of digital collections design and assessment tools. This dashboard will feature a Library2020 demonstration project we are calling “Inclusive Curation.” Inclusive Curation coordinates the work of various Internet Archive curatorial partners, makes transparent their decisions, creates a user-friendly mechanism for public feedback, and promotes a welcoming, community-responsive, transparent form of book selection for the IA 100&Change project — ultimately serving as a model for the creation of more diverse and democratized digital collections everywhere.

Except from Internet Archives’ 100&Change Grant proposal July 2017:

Five-Year Plan for Open Libraries— a project by the Internet Archive

C. Curating Books for Maximum Impact

One of this project’s most exciting opportunities is to select which four million books—the equivalent of a major urban public library—to carry forward for today’s online learners as well as future generations. We had to ask ourselves: How do you curate millions of books in a way that is inclusive, responsive to the community and transparent? Section C outlines our approach. We start with core lists serving diverse segments of our society: K-16 students, public library patrons, people with disabilities, Spanish-speakers. Curation at this scale is mostly about parsing data. Take, for example, how we might derive the College Core list. Our Curator of Books will start by

taking the metadata (ISBNs) from a typical mid-size college library collection, and cross it with the Open Syllabus list of the books most-assigned in college classes. We could then run “scripts” to see which of these books are already in IA’s collections. Our curator might analyze the books that remain for overlap with those most widely held by the 16,000 libraries who subscribe to OCLC’s cataloging service. Doing these overlap studies gives us a prioritized wish list of books highly relevant to college students. But computers alone cannot build a good collection. That’s why we are working with the

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), whose Curation Corps of 20 volunteer librarians will help hand-select a total of 100,000 books in Year One, and one million over the life of the project. These experienced librarians will help select titles reflecting our diverse communities (#6).

All of these wish lists will be posted on the new dashboard built by the Digital Library Federation (DLF), along with best practices in selecting culturally diverse books. DLF will lead a transparent process for community feedback. These activities are listed in #8, as the Inclusive Curation Project and overseen by IA’s Curator of Books.